Experience the first sounds of Benoît Pioulard’s fifth album

Kranky are releasing a brand new album by Benoît Pioulard, entitled Sonnet on the 30th March. The sound of the fifth Benoît Pioulard full length is lush and verdant, a temperate rain forest of ear ecstasy that reflects the environment surrounding the artist. A mostly instrumental work, it is an adept melding of song and sound, melody and texture, the intangible and the palpable, that in an abstract sense recalls the more fractured and loose end of the 70ʼs krautrock movement.LISTEN TO “SO ETCHED IN MEMORY”

Below is some further insight from Thomas Meluch aka, Benoît Pioulard…

“The basis of the album was a series of field recordings of tones and unintentional harmonies that I made in the summer & fall of 2013 – whistling industrial air conditioners, bird songs, locust drones, washing machines – that I mimicked or interpreted on the guitar, making loops that developed into fuller compositions…

…Several of the pieces are recreations of harmony loops that I heard in a series of extraordinarily vivid dreams, and then woke up and recorded. A few pieces had lyrics and vocal parts that I ultimately removed; at a certain point the album became an exercise in restraint, so I strove to leave only what I felt absolutely essential…

…Unlike most of my previous recordings, there are no digital / software after-effects on the album; all sounds are from analog tape and / or my few guitar pedals.” – Thomas Meluch (Benoît Pioulard)

TRACK LISTING:

1. With No Advantage
2. The Gilded Fear That Guides The Flow
3. Of Everything That Rhymes
4. Is In Its Clearest Form
5. An Image Apart From Ourselves
6. Whose Palms Create
7. As Would a Weaver
8. A Shade of Celadon
9. So Etched in Memory
10. Upon the Break Arch
11. That Wounded Weathered
12. Shut-ins on Sunday See
13. The Very Edge of its Flame
14. And Relent

SELECT QUOTES FOR HYMNAL:

“His songs have always been draped in sumptuous echoes and rich textures, his vocals resting somewhere in the swirl of the mix, but here there is more emphasis on sustained elements..The effect of these new elements is to bring a new solemnity and calm to Pioulard’s already gentle brand of blissed out songwriting.” – WIRE

“Hymnal is a beautiful record; a voice and guitar picked up gently on a breeze, half-lost to echo and the soft, mumbled manner of Pioulard’s vocal execution. Flecks of woozy late-night samba come in the form of slinking guitar strums and castanet clacks, while the simplicity of some of his melodies brings to mind Cocteau Twins’ clouds of romance.” – ROCK A ROLLA

“Pioulard is at his best when making thick, textural, ambient songs…Hymnal is Benoît Pioulard at his most vital.” – FLUID AUDIO